I’m not crazy about Blu-ray, so I started to think of alternative ways to deliver the 1080p version of the movie and came across these usb bracelets. When I started to think about what else you could put on it, I realized there was a connection to one of the ideas in the movie: that in 2025 the Cloud was repossessed. I like the idea that people can also use it to store their own locally owned data, as insurance against that day. Or even if nothing happens, for a time when you make the choice to get off the Cloud (or the grid) and find out that something you clicked I Agree to years ago limits that choice.

You can pick it up for 4 more days on Kickstarter. (Did I mention it got a rave review in the Guardian?) More thoughts below.

There’s lots of ideas in the movie. Will the Nigerian Spam Cartel really have a military? Will a decimated Zurich make the slums of Toronto look good? For that matter, do I really believe that China will be the first world and North American become the third? I dunno! I’m not a futurist. I haven’t done a ton of economic research, but then again, it’s rare to find a person writing about zombie apocalypses who have done extensive research on disease vectors: that’s where the suspension of disbelief comes in. My role is to tease out the undercurrents of fear and anxiety that exist in our culture to explore this possible future, to populate it with people rather than graphs, to give slang and specificity to it: partially to stimulate political discussion and partially for entertainment. Science fiction can be an inoculation against the future it’s predicting. Without giving the surveillance state a name, I have no doubt that Big Brother would be watching much more closely. There’s always gonna be a mix of sincerity and satire in my stuff — but I think it’s telling that my most sincere work of science fiction, Everyone In Silico, is still inspiring awesome videos like this ten years after I released it.

But in opposition to this fairly lazy-faire attitude I have about a lot of the ideas, I find the notion of the Cloud being repossessed a very real one. The Cloud is dominated by a few companies, and by then they could have merged into one and been sold to the highest bidder. I personally see myself being more and more dependent on Google services: having been frustrated for years by incomplete syncing options, the fact that they’ve done it well has engendered in me an almost pathetic gratefulness. But any centralized power is prone to exploitation and, in an all-your-eggs-in-one-basket way, is vulnerable. It’s nice that the culture at Google is currently anti-Evil. It’s nice that Twitter is not rolling over and handing over data about Occupy activists. But cultures change. And the people who start innovative companies that become huge & powerful are one type of person: the kind of person who is attracted to huge, powerful companies are a different kind of person. When this second wave take the reins they’ll make different decisions.

The dangers of slowly consolidating power is not a very sexy battle cry. I used leaving HarperCollins as a way to discuss this issue in 2000 and have spent a fair amount of time talking about Rupert Murdoch. Of course he’s a terrible person: but he’s just a particularly egregious example of what happens when we allow unlimited consolidation to occur. These days people will bring up Murdoch to me as if finally, my nemesis has been caught: that it’s my time to pull a Malcolm X and opine that chickens have come home to roost. But to be honest I feel like he’s just so consistently outraged people by not playing nice and laying bare the unfairness of the system that he is, in a weird way, a scapegoat.

Our society has enabled Rupert by rewarding him for his unethical behavior with money and influence — the phone hacking scandal is just the most obviously evil stuff.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy he’s getting a licking. But my point is that we have to think through ways to limit consolidation of power in these internet services, because otherwise we are building a huge machine for unknown people to use. Sure it’s useful now, but a few generations down the line some equally unethical Murdoch-esque person will weasel their way into the machine’s cockpit and start wreaking havoc on the world. It’s kind of irrelevant if that person happens to be Chinese or not.

I was lucky enough to attend the world premiere of our movie, Ghosts With Shit Jobs, with a sold out crowd in London’s Piccadilly Circus last night. More pics after the jump.

Sci-Fi-London was just an amazing fest for it to have its debut. Here we have programmer Louis Savy introducing the movie with his trademark profane charm. Louis is a real advocate for DIY filmmaking and he and his team have been building a diverse and open-minded science fiction movie audience over the past decade.

Here’s me doing my best to answer the smart questions from the host and the audience.

Even the lobby of the theatre was terrific, a great place to have a drink and chat about the movies.

Thanks to everyone who made it happen! Off to Berlin today for the next screening, and looking forward to our Toronto debut at the end of the month. If you’re not in these towns, there’s still ten days to grab an advance copy for $10 and support our continued theatrical tour.

Thanks to Derek for the pics.

BFI Future Film and SCI-FI-LONDON Present… Micro Budget Sci- Fi Filmmaking – May 5th, 12:45
Join us for a Q+A with Directors Jim Munroe (Ghosts with Sh*t Jobs), G B Hajim (Strange Love) and Sloan U’Ren (Dimensions) as we discuss the future of sci-fi on film, and making sci-fi movies on a micro budget. Our panel will also be giving feedback on sci-fi shorts made by young filmmakers that will be screened as part of this event.

Now we get to decide where we go!

If you have any interest in seeing us bring Ghosts With Shit Jobs to your town, please drop a line. We’re looking for people who’re willing to spread the word in their community and in teaming up with like-minded organizations or collectives (or mythical constructs) to make it happen.

Some interesting stats: approximately 25% of the money funded came from Kickstarter inbound links. The platform more than earned its 5% cut.

I recognized about 25% of the names of the donors, and the rest were lovely, generous, strangers to me — but probably many of them were familiar to our large cast and crew.

For those who haven’t pledged yet, you have until May 18th to get a DRM-free copy of the movie direct from us for ten bucks.

My new lo-fi sci-fi feature, Ghosts With Shit Jobs, will be screening in a few cities in May. We’re running a one month Kickstarter campaign to raise the funds to screen it in more cities, and if you support us for $10 or more you can get a special advance copy of the entire feature in June. Please check out our video and rewards!

Our world premiere is happening May 7th at 7:45pm in London, England, as a part of the excellent Sci-Fi-London festival. It’s then screening at Moviemento, Germany’s oldest cinema, in Berlin, Germany on May 10th at 10:15pm. Then we’re back home for our Toronto debut at the Royal on May 30th at 7pm (you can buy tickets here!). I’m going to be present at all the screenings, doing my best to represent for our incredible cast and crew.

If you’re not sure if it’s for you check out the trailer (over 125,000 views!) and the first 20 minutes of the movie — we’ve just posted the introduction to Serina, Human Spam.

A big part of the reason I like community organizing, beyond the social and cultural aspects, is that it allows me to design systems. Beyond their cleverness and elegance, systems are great at automating routine things and I find this useful in a number of ways in my life.

When I’m working on a book, I have a number of words I write per week — 5000. I break this down further into 4 sessions of 1250 words each. Each session takes 3-4 hours. I can then schedule four 4 hour sessions a week and no longer have to think about it. I don’t waste mental energy on wondering if I’m writing enough. I know at this rate I’ll have a novel-length draft in six months. I often move the sessions around in the week, but pretty much always have my 5000 words done by the end of the week, often by Friday. I don’t presume that that particular system will work for everyone, but I do feel that some system will work for most people: and that it can allay feelings of guilt and angst. It’s a matter of designing a few and playtesting them.

If you find yourself mired in questions like “Should I even bother?” or “Am I good enough?” it’s because you’re giving yourself too much choice: if you can commit to making an overriding decision at the beginning of the project it’s easier to ignore these questions throughout the project itself. Because, let’s face it, over a six month project you’re bound to feel negative at some point and you shouldn’t let it derail you.

Veganism, for me, is a systemic approach for expressing my discomfort with the hypocritical way we love animals until they’re too delicious. Rather than making a million tiny decisions weighing the consequences of my consumer choices, I have made a single, fairly substantial one. How do you want to allocate your brain’s processing power?

I’ve talked quite a bit about how agenda books offload a lot of stress and mental energy onto a tool in Time Management for Anarchists, but that’s another system.

I imagine I’ve lost a few people already with my machine metaphors and quantification. Ah well. Some of you are saying, “Systems ARE great! Until they’re driving tanks over us?”

Of course most systems are chock full of power dynamics, but just because most computers run Windows doesn’t mean yours can’t run Linux. Autonomous systems are a way of getting shit done without a hierarchy, because the system itself has a kind of abstract authority. If you’ve built a system that has a track record of success or of producing good stuff, then people will often trust it.

Personally, I’m always uncomfortable in a role of authority, but I like helping people make stuff. I’m currently rethinking a process of gamemaking education where instead of being led by a teacher or coordinator, that role rotates from person to person with each session. The real learning comes from making the game, and to be guided away from making obvious mistakes by teachers actually deprives you of a more memorable object lesson, and sometimes deprives you of happy accidents that are creatively enriching.

I mean, when you walk you don’t think about each and every footfall, do you? You’re daydreaming, scheming, ignorant of the efficient meat machinery below your brainstem. Embrace automata!

~~~

Matt Hammill did the illustration.

Now you get to play the newest kind of soldier: one who remotely drops bombs on foreign soil during the day, and at night goes home to his family in the suburbs. In Unmanned, the conflict is internal — the only blood you’ll shed is from shaving cuts. But is there collateral damage in this new way of waging war?

I did the writing for it. We went out to Sundance for its debut, and now you can play it online here.

“Unmanned‘s a sharp satire that highlights how video games can circumvent traditional modes of political discourse.” — Kotaku

Check out the introduction of Anton and Toph Karrento, the Silk Gatherers, the latest clip from my lo-fi sci-fi feature Ghosts With Shit Jobs.

This is actually the segment I directed, and although I did it reluctantly (I figure my real skill sets are producing/writing), it was a joy to work with these two super-talented guys. Fantastic at improv, they totally internalized the 2040 world in a way that just floored me. And I felt they nailed the dysfunctional brothers dynamic. After we wrapped I made a text adventure game starring them that you can play here, just so I could spend some more time hanging out in my head with them. Is that weird, bro?

A. The only thing we could do, really… trash the defectives and start pumping out a new batch.

Check out the introduction of Gary and Karen, the Baby Makers, the latest clip from my lo-fi sci-fi feature Ghosts With Shit Jobs.